Mindful interventions: Youth, poverty, and the developing brain

Mindfulness meditation is being advocated as a promising new educational, clinical, and social intervention for youth, fueled by new evidence from neuroscience about the benefits of growing the brain through meditation, convergent with recent data on developmental neuroplasticity. Although still marginal and in some cases controversial, secular programs of mindfulness have been implemented with ambitious goals of improving attentional focus of pupils, social-emotional learning in at-risk children and youth and, not least, to intervene in problems of poverty and incarceration. In this article, we present insights from an ongoing study involving teachers and mentors working with young people using mindfulness education from an emerging project on the social and cultural contexts of neuroeducation. Our analysis points to the role of neuroscience in positioning these programs as legitimate and progressive, based on state-of-the-art science. We discuss the tensions arising from their moral reframing of social problems associated with poverty and inequality.